Evolution's Captain (2 page)

When they returned for a second season of surveying, Stokes was instructed to proceed again to the western part of the strait, and from there continue surveying north as far as Chiloé Island. He sailed once more from Port Famine in March 1828, eager, as far as his commanding officer Captain King knew, to add to his work of the year before. But this second plunge turned his mind. Into his plainly written journal, a normally staid, even dull accounting of daily navigation and notable features passed on the coast, there crept a maggot of dissonance, the first tremors of a sickness that would ineluctably waste and finally destroy:

The scenery in the Strait of Magellan should not have looked repulsive or otherworldly to Stokes. In places it resembles the European Alps, or the magnificence of the Scottish Highlands, which had been widely appreciated in the romantic fiction of Sir Walter Scott. (Stokes's use of the word “jungle” to describe vegetation is misleading: what he saw was a dense scrim of tundra mosses and thigh-high forests of storm-bent trees; average temperatures ashore hovered year-round at just above freezing; snow frequently settled over this “jungle.”) In the more protected fjords, the landscapes resemble those described by Vancouver and Cook in their accounts of travels along the west coast of North America and Australia and New Zealand, or the early nineteenth-century paintings of the Hudson River Valley and the untrammeled spaces of the new United States, all of which had set people in England to talking about the sublimity of such natural edens.

But Stokes would not see it. He did not agree with Pigafetta that “there is not in the world a more beautiful country.” To him it became a malignant vision. He began to hate it with a poison that worked its way through him, through his journal, and it appeared inescapable:

The conditions through which he attempted to push the
Beagle
did nothing to lighten his view.

The ship was frequently stormbound, frustrating Stokes's attempts at progress and the success of his mission.

Ship management was always difficult. At times boats had to be lowered to drag the
Beagle
from possible shipwreck.

Stokes pushed on up the western shores of Patagonia for another two months. His journal revealed a mounting catalog of torment and failure, and a pathological estrangement from his work.

It got worse. The ship's 28-foot-long yawl, “a beautiful boat,” and vital to their surveying methods, was smashed to pieces while being hoisted aboard in a gale: “We were obliged to cut her adrift…. her loss was second only to that of the ship.”

Stokes's crew, despite being outfitted with foul weather “clothing”—lengths of painted canvas to wrap around themselves (this only ensured a clammy discomfort)—began to fall apart dramatically. They were generally hardy young men, in their teens through their thirties, but without being able to get ashore and supplement the ship's salt beef and pork and rock-hard biscuit with fresh meat, they soon began to suffer from scurvy. Their gums bled and their teeth loosened, old scars opened, they grew listless and weak, and the cold accelerated this frighteningly, until it seemed that Stokes's crew might not be able to control the ship. After consulting with his surgeon, Mr. Bynoe, Stokes made for a landlocked anchorage where the
Beagle
was temporarily decommissioned for a period of conva
lescence. The yards and topmasts were struck, the ship was covered with sails for protection, the crew were put on light duty, the sick were tended. Even safe from storms, their harbor of refuge…

And here Stokes's journal stops. Even he must have tired of the repetition of his lamentations.

After a two-week rest, the crew somewhat revived, the
Beagle
sailed south and east heading back to the Strait of Magellan and Port Famine, where the
Adventure
was waiting for her. The passage took almost four weeks and Captain Stokes remained in his cabin the entire time. The ship was effectively commanded by his assistant surveyor, Lieutenant William Skyring, and the ship's sailing master, Samuel Flinn.

Fighting strong winds to the last, even tacking into sheltered water, the
Beagle
reached Port Famine after dark on the wintry evening of July 27. Skyring immediately had the bosun's gig row him across to the
Adventure
where he climbed aboard and reported Stokes's condition to Captain King. King went to see for himself.

“I went on board the
Beagle
in the evening and found Captain Stokes, after the first two or three minutes, perfectly collected and communicative of all the events of his cruize,” he later wrote in a long letter to the Admiralty. “For three days afterwards I saw him daily during which he resumed all his duties with increased energy.”

However, King told his ship's surgeon to confer with Benjamin Bynoe, the
Beagle
's doctor, so both men could give him an opinion of Stokes's health. They told him that although Stokes had at times in the last few months “expressed himself weary of life and wished to meet his death,” he now seemed so recovered
that they thought he might be able to carry on his duties. Those duties meant continuing the surveying mission for several more years at least. While the two surgeons were aboard the
Adventure
actually reporting this to King, word came from the
Beagle
that Stokes had shot himself.

They found him in his cabin, his head streaming blood, his linen shirt and clothes drenched, blood slippery on the cabin sole, but Stokes was quite conscious and even apologetic for making himself a nuisance. The two doctors immediately did what they could for him, which wasn't much: a head wound, no exit wound, the pistol's ball lodged somewhere inside. They cleaned him up and laid him in his bunk.

For the next three days, King spent hours aboard the
Beagle
with Stokes, who remained “perfectly collected.” As they talked, King went through Stokes's papers, his journal and surveying observations, the ship's daily memoranda, accounts, and orders. These “were in so confused and scattered a condition,” wrote King, “that I despaired of putting them into any order.”

Stokes was overwhelmed with remorse. He told King that the main reason for his “unhappy malady” was his fear that he wasn't up to the job, that his defects as a surveyor were bound to come to light. And they did, as King began to see that most of what had been accomplished on the
Beagle
's cruise—the charts, the harbor plans, the laborious azimuths and bearings and calculations made in the course of surveying—was the work of Lieutenant Skyring and the junior officers. The calculations written in Stokes's hand were actually copies of what had been done by the others. This was never admitted in King's subsequently published account of the cruises of the
Beagle
and the
Adventure
, in which he praised Captain Stokes for his work and stoicism. In his letter to the Admiralty, however, King shifted his praise to the ship's master, Flinn, for extricating the
Beagle
from “situations of impending danger into which her Commander had unwarily and rashly rushed without any regard to the lives of so many people under his protection…. The state of Captain Stokes's
mind drove him at times to such desperate acts, as regarded the conduct of the ship, in which he would be controlled by no one, but (when the case arrived at a pitch of extreme danger) by the Master Flinn.” Before returning to Port Famine, Stokes had extracted a pledge from his officers that they would never tell what had happened. But now, lying on his bunk, his deception revealed, he told King everything and praised Flinn with almost exactly the same self-recriminatory words.

At moments, as he lay in his bloody berth, Stokes even talked of resuming command once he recovered, as he began to feel he would. But after three days of excited chatter and confession he worsened. Gangrene slowly made its way through his brain. It took him twelve days to die. The first entry in the
Beagle
's log for August 12, 1828, made just after midnight, reads: “Light breezes and cloudy. Departed this life Pringle Stokes, Esq., Commander.”

After death, his body was examined. Despite his tremorous hand, the gunshot had done its job. The surgeons, duty bound to provide postmortem evidence, opened Stokes's head and found the pistol's small-bore ball lodged in the corrupted mess of his brain.

They also found seven nearly healed knife wounds in Stokes's chest: the inept captain had been trying to kill himself for weeks.

 

The two ships then sailed north for the winter. The crews of
both vessels were weak from months of exposure and hard service on insufficient rations. They had caught fish and shot what game they could find, but it was never enough, and they were plagued by scurvy. At Montevideo they took aboard a supply of bitter Seville oranges and these alone had every man better in less than a week.

The
Beagle
spent six weeks in Montevideo undergoing repairs to its hull, while King sailed north in the
Adventure
to Rio de Janeiro, where he was to report to Sir Robert Otway, the commander-in-chief of the South American fleet, aboard the fleet's flagship, HMS
Ganges
. After two seasons in the remote
south, much of the surveying work commissioned by the lords of the Admiralty was still unaccomplished. Despite the hardship that had driven one captain to suicide, killed several officers, and left men on both ships weakened from scurvy,
Adventure
and
Beagle
were to go south again.

On Stokes's death, King had appointed Lieutenant Skyring as the
Beagle's
acting commander. The promotion, when Skyring assumed it on August 12, 1828, was still unofficial; not until confirmed by Sir Robert Otway would he be formally recognized as the
Beagle
's new captain. However, with his accomplishments aboard the ship under conditions harrowing inboard and out, the captaincy appeared to be his.

But Otway had his own ideas. He superseded Skyring with a favorite of his own, the
Ganges'
lieutenant, twenty-three-year-old Robert FitzRoy. No doubt King remonstrated to the extent he felt able with his commanding officer in the privacy of Otway's cabin aboard the
Ganges
. Skyring was the obvious choice: he knew the
Beagle
intimately, he had handled both the ship (along with Master Flinn) and her former captain with delicacy and skill, and although nominally the assistant surveyor, he had done the main part of that work while Stokes was going to pieces in his cabin. Otway was not swayed. Stokes had also been King's choice, and now Otway wanted his man aboard the
Beagle
.

King could only submit to his superior's wish. Years later, in the published account of his South American voyage, he still politely objected: